Mac graphics cards
I find it cosmically ironic that the Macintosh's biggest strength -- graphics -- is also a big weakness. Ever since PCs moved into the realm of hardware accelerated 3D graphics Apple has been lagging. It's partly their fault and it's partly not their fault too. This point was driven home to me this morning when I was writing up a recap of ATI's recently announcements of three new desktop chips, with a Mac version of their last flagship desktop chip still MIA.
I understand the reasons why development itself lags. It's partly economy of scale -- 97 percent of the market demands an equivalent amount of resources. One can't expect ATI or Nvidia to devote themselves part and parcel to the Macintosh market when they have bigger and frankly more important fish to fry. That's a cross I'm perfectly willing to bear.
No, what I get bent about is when Apple does stupid things, like taking its high-end box and putting a mainstream graphics chip in it.
Even if it doesn't make a huge amount of performance difference if the Power Mac G4 uses a Radeon 9000 or a GeForce 4 Ti, I still think Apple should do the right thing and put the high-end graphics system in its high-end boxes.
I can't understand why Apple, which already has the highest margins in the computer business, isn't willing to sacrifice a bit of those profits and provide users with more of what they want. Apple is already at a serious deficit when it comes to CPU performance, at least when it comes to gaming. The PowerPC may be good for some things, and may very well be able to outpace Pentium CPUs running at much higher frequencies for certain tasks. But it's damn rotten when it comes to game performance compared with Pentium 4's running at twice the clock speed or even higher. Having a mainstream graphics card in there is just rubbing salt in the wounds.
I really wish that Apple would make more of a concerted effort to consistently get the faster graphics technology into their boxes, too. There's still no sign of GeForce FX on the Mac platform, despite Apple's seemingly love affair with Nvidia -- a topic I've discussed before.
Comments
I hate it when you're right.
Posted by: Corey | March 6, 2003 01:41 PM
What about Mac and Photoshop. in the old days, we were sure that Mac was the best. now there aren't clear discussions of value and optimization for real worls PS on a Mac.
I have a G4 dual 533 MHZ tower and for my work with large images it is slo.........w!
A update to a Power Logix dual 1G HZ would only increase filters by about 30%. I already have 1.5 GB in ram.
Where are the modern technology PS specific accelerator cards. I'm not currently doing 3D modeling or playing games.
do such cards exist, Radeon used to make them. What is the current state of affairs and how can I increase my PS work by about 400%?
Can I link several computers together? Where exactly is the bottlenek?
Posted by: asher | May 12, 2003 07:45 PM